My teaching and research at the University of Birmingham focuses on contemporary literature. Prior to joining Birmingham I was a postdoctoral research associate at King’s College London, working on the European Research Council-funded project, “Ego-Media: The Impact of New Media on Forms and Practices of Self-Presentation” (2014-2019). Before this I completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, a Masters at the University of Edinburgh and my undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Despite a very English accent, I was born in the USA and schooled there, Germany, and in the British state school system. 

My research straddles twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literatures. I am particularly interested in the relation of literature and literary studies to wider culture and in thinking about the shaping import of technologies. This inevitably means I get excited about a wide variety of topics: digital cultures, book and media history (including reading communities), life writing, transnational modernism and its legacies, the institutionalisation of literary studies, literary and interdisciplinary methodologies, cultural studies.

My first book, Literature and the Rise of the Interview examines the rise of the interview in literary culture and was published by OUP in 2018.

My second research project examines the intersection between literature and computing since WW2 and is organised into two books. The first "Programming Literature", traces the ways in which writers have used and thought with computing historically. The second "Machine Talk" is an intellectual history of how conversation became a key metaphor and model for understanding world literature and computing (a back history of ChatGPT if I am being glib).

This cultural and technological background has led to my role as a Principal Investigator on the Stuart Hall Archive Project (2023-26) where I will be leading the "Dialogues" strand - thinking digitally with Hall.

I also write about contemporary literary cultures: I am working on a book entitled The Social Life of Literature and my co-written digital publication, Ego Media, was published with Stanford UP Digital in 2023.

Internally, I am a member of the Centre for Digital Cultures, the Centre of Contemporary Literature and Culture, and a member of the Humanities & Social Sciences Ethical Review Board, with a particular interest in digital research ethics. Externally, I am on the editorial board of the European Journal of Life Writing and also edited the Modern Section of the Year's Work in English Studies for a while.